Living Relic

Living Relic

It’s weird to be thought of as something—someone—existing only in the past. I mean it’s weird to find myself momentarily conscious of the fact that there are people out there who think of me (if they think of me at all) solely as a blip on their radar in the 1990’s, as if for them my whole life following my brief period of minor music fame didn’t happen. Like I was a tree that fell in the woods.

But I have been living my life, making sounds. Not such an interesting life on the surface, maybe, but a life, full of private triumphs and disappointments. And I know that there are plenty of people who have kept following my never-ending musical path, or first discovered it along the paths of their lives. Some of them weren’t even born yet when I started making records.

I don’t like to look back at what I was projecting, deliberately or not (mostly not) during the alt-rock-mania of the very late 20th Century; I only take note of what the passage of time has done to my representational image when some random stranger comments under a current video or photo posting of mine that I have aged.

Well, yeah. That’s what happens. If you don’t die, you get older.

(On the flip side are the occasional comments noting that I am “still” “cute”, which is a whole other conversation…about why anyone believes a mature woman would think it is a compliment to be told she is cute (like a puppy or a doll), especially when the cute years are usually the most anguished and fucked-up years, emotionally speaking. Why does anyone think that most if not all women want to be infantilized until death? Is it just ongoing capitalistic-consumeristic propaganda to keep women buying beauty products and unnecessary facial and body treatments and surgeries or is it everyday historic ingrained sexist oppression or what?)

Maybe for some people I was frozen in time when I was young and supple and pulchritudinous, as I must seem since then to have disappeared from the conversation.

Even if I had had cosmetic surgery by this point, as some of my peers probably have, it wouldn’t have fixed the issue of time’s onward rush, because even after cosmetic surgery, older people don’t look younger and they don’t look frozen in time. They just look frozen. (Unless they have really talented, really expensive doctors.) Obvious facial work—and most is obvious—only highlights the fact of the inevitable. (We get older.)

Part of why I don’t like to look back at the 1990s is that I was so miserable back then. SO miserable. When I was in my 20s, on a major label and being photographed and interviewed and playing on TV and charting on “modern rock” radio and meeting my heroes—all these things that should have pumped me up and made me feel successful— I was heavily depressed and teeth-grindingly anxious and insecure and self-hating and eating-disordered and practically non-functional. I was crawling, flattened by my own interior load of crosses to bear.

How miserable was I? It is hard to even begin to explain. I think my songs tried to communicate some of it. First-world problems, yes. But, still, real ones that felt crippling and which probably helped to slam the brakes on my burgeoning career. I was so sodden with psycho-emo decrepitude that I don’t think I even realized how truly and pathologically unwell I was, at the time. I was too much inside of it and simply trying to get through the days and nights without any help from anyone, writhing, in agony, in my personal darkness.

(-Amanda Petrusich , again, from an article about Olivia Rodrigo)

Heaven knows I’m not as miserable now. I’m still a malcontent, and mostly without illusions (I think I was born disillusioned) but I’m much less of a burning car wreck.

My disappearance from the general public’s radar did not surprise me at all; I predicted it. I always felt that the publicity-industrial-complex machine churning around me was hype and I really believed that I didn’t deserve that much attention. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, maybe I wished I did, but all the buzz seemed so artificial, so manufactured.

Look at me now, if you want. Listen to my voice. It’s all a little different now. Getting older is a process, like youth was a process. Nothing ever stays the same. As long as we live. As long as we have the good fortune to endure.